Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/1332040
1 0 4 P E R S P E C T I V E | J A N U A R Y / F E B R U A R Y 2 0 2 1 I've never read a script from David Fincher that was anything less than smart and purposeful. This held true with Mank. Mank is the story of screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and his scripting of the fi lm Citizen Kane for Orson Welles and RKO Studios. While the fi lm primarily deals with Mankiewicz's tumultuous struggles in completing the screenplay, including his uneven relationship with Welles, it also addresses early fi lmmaking in 1930s Los Angeles and the behavior of the studio power brokers for whom Mankiewicz had been previously employed. Woven into the story are larger social issues of the era and the infl uencersnamely William Randolph Hearstwho in conjunction with studio executives (and to Mankiewicz's dismay) manipulated the populace on political matters through wealth, deception and media control. All of this converges to shape the scribing by Mankiewicz of Citizen Kane. After preliminary discussions with David about his vision for the fi lm, we began the initial production process by scouting locations together in July of 2019. Location management was already engaged and organized the surveys. We had a basic understanding of which sets would be location and which sets would be stage. As we all know, this always shifts through the physical scouting which prompted our desire to engage in this undertaking sooner as opposed to later since it had obvious schedule and budget implications. Production would not offi cially begin until late August, with an ambitious and challenging twelve weeks of T h e S c r i b i n g o f C i t i z e n K a n e M A N K B Y D O N A L D G R A H A M B U R T, P R O D U C T I O N D E S I G N E R A. STUDIO BACKLOT. PRODUCTION STILL. A